Hmmm, I thought Geisel was Jewish and leftist from the beginning. Yes, I have seen his cartoons (including anti-Fascist ones from before the war), and the style is there.

I haven't seen "Cat in the Hat" in years, if ever, so I can't comment on the fish, but I read "Cat in the Hat Comes Back" to my four-year-old daughter probably twice a week or more. In discussing the story with my clinical psychologist spouse, I refer to Voom as the deus ex machina for cleaning up the mess, magically restoring the snow and the alphabetical cats to status quo ante, except that the sidewalk shoveling is done. The parallel to the atomic bomb suggested in the review is unsettling, though surely not intentional.

The Cold War messages of Dr. Suess are surely no more or less valid than the supposed currency-debate messages of the Wizard of Oz -- the Cowardly Lion as William Jennings Bryan, the Yellow Brick Road as the Gold Standard, the silver slippers, it goes on and on. Frank Baum was not a silver advocate (his views are known because also wrote newspaper editorials), but he lived and worked on the Great Plains, where these issues dominated politics at the time, and he must have internalized some of it.

Back in the 1970s, I wrote a story in a creative writing class about a King dealing with a rebellious province. The professor and the class instantly understood the King to be a metaphor for Richard Nixon. No, no, I protested, he is just a King I made up, no modern politics in this at all, but the discussants came up with parallel after parallel to the situation in Washington, and I had to give up my denials. Watergate was in the air, and I had breathed it.